what can vegans learn from gandhi?
Make it stand out
The salt marches led by Gandhi can be a great lesson to vegan activism.
I keep meeting people who don’t know about the salt marches Gandhi did to start a peaceful rebellion against the British Empire.
Most of his cohorts wanted him to be a lot quieter about the whole thing. He wasn’t about that life.
They wanted him to help with a land tax protests. Many of them were afraid of what the Raj would do if they made too much fuss, while others wanted an all-out violent revolution.
Gandhi knew that most of the world had salt on their tables, a necessity of life. And at the time the restrictions on Indian life were so extreme that a citizen of India would be thrown in jail for making his own salt by evaporation on the shores of the Indian ocean.
The British liked monopolies they controlled, and they’d done things like this before in India, and no one seemed to mind that much. They were great at controlling tea, spices, opium, and all sorts of things in India, and as long as all the right people got paid, no one really cared about the plight of the people living in India.
That all changed when Gandhi left his house with 78 friends and supporters and walked 240 miles to the coast. When he got there, 78,000 people were with him, and they watched him make salt, proving British laws were ridiculous and easily broken.
It resulted in the arrest of 60,000 Indians and further protests and hunger strikes.
I think this why vegans seem loud to people who eat meat. We are challenging something that seems so mundane and calling it a great injustice. People were used to British rule after all. Why rock the boat? And we are talking about food, something we all need. It’s ubiquitous and nearly invisible in a way. We all eat. Why think too much about it if it isn’t making it prettier and taking pictures of it and posting it to Instagram? Why are you making such a fuss about the injustices behind food?
Because we want them to change.
Gandhi was told a million times to just shut up and deal with it. But he didn’t.
And when he was able to convince a minority of people to join him, the world tipped in his favor, and others were able to see how horrible life was in India at the time under British rule.
He inspired activist leaders for generations to come.
What happened later in India is something for historians to discuss. It’s certainly a rich history, and the subsequent partition of India has its own lessons we can draw; it’s something everyone should read about at some point.
What couldn’t be ignored anymore was that one country’s draconian rule over another, oppressing giant classes separating them from necessities of life whilst degrading their dignity isn’t tolerable. And that’s what vegans ultimately want to draw attention to when it comes to the contemporary treatment of animals.
I know Gandhi wasn’t perfect, and there is a link to the darker side of the man in the description of my video on YouTube. But what I’m proposing is that we take heart as vegan activists and a lesson from What Gandhi accomplished with his salt marches.
